Recent Posts in industry

February 23, 2015

A six second drum break from The Winstons' "Amen, Brother" (the b-side to their 1969 hit "Color Him Father") is arguably the most famous "break" ever. The "Amen Break" has been sampled on countless hip hop records (famously on NWA's "Straight Outa Compton") and, sped up and chopped up, basically became the backbone of every jungle/drum and bass record ever. If you're still scratching your head, or are just curious to know more, Nate Harrison's terrific 2004 short documentary on the "amen break" is required viewing. Watch it below.

Despite the sample's place in the pop culture lexicon, neither Winstrons drummer G. C. Coleman (who died in 2006), nor frontman Richard L. Spencer (who wrote and arranged the song and owns the copyright) have ever received royalties for the sample. (The Statute of limitations has run out to pursue it legally now.) However, a UK DJ has started a crowdfunding campaign to give money to Richard Spencer and Coleman's family:

if you have ever written or sold any music with the amen break, or even just enjoyed one of the countless hundreds and hundreds of tunes that contain it over various genres and styles of music, please donate towards the good cause of the worldwide music community giving something back to the man behind the legendary breakbeat.

The campaign began five days ago with hopes of raising £1,000 and it's already had £11,000 pledged.

Check out the documentary and a few famous uses of the "amen break," below...

December 5, 2014

Mike Simonetti, who founded both Troubleman Unlimited and Italians Do it Better, has started a new musical project, Pale Blue, which is a collaboration with Elizabeth Wight of Silver Hand. Their debut album, The Past We Leave Behind, will be out April 14 -- that's the cover art above -- and you can stream the Italo-y title track below.

The Pale Blue album will also be the first release on new label 2MR which is part of Captured Tracks' Omnian Music umbrella. That's "Two Mikes Records," the other one being C/T domo Mike Sniper.

While Pale Blue haven't broached the subject of live performances yet, Simonetti will be DJing on Thursday (12/11) at Output as part of the Input James Murphy Vs Tim Sweeney night. Tickets are still available.

November 24, 2014

Beach Fossils frontman Dustin Payseur and his wife (and former Captured Tracks label manager) Katie Garcia have just launched a new label, Bayonet Records. The Fader talked to Garcia and Payseur about Bayonet:

Since he was young, Payseur's dreamed about running a label. "I found these cassettes from when I was a kid, where I was recording me screaming 'Fuck' into the mic over a drum machine, and I'd put like fake record label names and logos on them," he said. Garcia feels similarly: "I always knew growing up I wanted to work in music," she told FADER. "Once Dustin started talking to me about how he wanted to seriously pursue [the label], it became the natural progression for me to help him manage it, since that's something I already knew how to do."

Beach Fossils will be a part of Bayonet roster, as will Payseur's other band, Laced. The label will also reissue Warehouse's debut, Tesseract, on March 3, the same day as cassettes/digital releases by Red Sea and Flouride. The first vinyl LP to be released by Bayonet will be Jerry Paper's Carousel on March 31.

October 6, 2014

Live Nation Entertainment, the concert and ticketing giant, is in advanced talks to buy a majority stake in C3 Presents, the country's largest independent promoter, with a portfolio that includes the popular Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals.

The prospective deal, in negotiations for months but still not completed, would give Live Nation a stake of 51 percent in C3 Presents, and value C3 at around $250 million, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

A spokeswoman for Live Nation declined to comment, and representatives of C3 did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday afternoon.

C3, based in Austin, Tex., is run by three friends all named Charles or Charlie -- in the music industry, they are widely known as "the Charlies" -- and the company has grown quickly from its founding in 2007.

C3, best known for owning those festivals, is also a major force in the Austin rock club scene. They recently bought the Emo's name (and its new location, Emo's East), and book shows at Stubb's, Lambert's, The Parish and other places. They also had a lot to do with Metallica's Orion Festival (which took place in Atlantic City and then Detroit).

September 16, 2014

It's been almost nine years since Clear Channel spun off Live Nation (who went on to buy Ticketmaster). Now:

Clear Channelon Tuesday refashioned itself as iHeartMedia, accentuating how the lines between online and AM/FM radio are blurring at the country's biggest company on the broadcast dial.

"It's not a company with a bunch of old radio stations and outdoor [billboards] anymore," Chief Executive Bob Pittman said in an interview. "We've transformed, so let's now take a name that matters."

iHeartRadio is Clear Channel's digital arm, a Pandora-like online service that also hosts the digital streams of the company's 840 traditional radio stations like KIIS FM in Los Angeles. Effective Tuesday, CC Media Holdings Inc. became iHeartMedia Inc. The company's over-the-counter stock ticker symbol will also change, effective Wednesday.

Streaming is the industry's most promising segment of growth, but tech-centered outfits like Pandora -- the Web's biggest radio operator -- and on-demand subscription services like Apple's Beats Music and Spotify tend to attract the most attention as they race to dominate the burgeoning sector. By recasting itself as iHeartMedia, Clear Channel not only recognizes the company itself has changed but also believes it will get due credit in the tech community for its gargantuan scope, Pittman said. [CNET]

August 13, 2014

I put together the weekly Upcoming Metal Releases at Invisible Oranges. Not to get too first-world-complain-y, but it can be a pain. With staggered release dates across the world (UK: Mondays, US: Tuesdays, Black metal: DGAF), my Excel tracking sheet ends up looking like a string board on The Wire. I end up having more corrections than a Prince-written essay on proper grammar.

So the announcement on Billboard that major labels and their partnerships are looking to shift to a global street date occurring weekly on Fridays sounds pretty good on the surface. (Kanye West: Yeah, duh.) The reason for the change is to thwart piracy, which makes sense if you subscribe to the logic that the first receiver is the first leaker. Torrents have made the world smaller and faster, so this gives artists in the laggy US market a chance to pack on some moved units.

Of course, there are downsides. It could further hurt on-the-street retailers and smaller labels. According to Billboard:

While sources say that digital music service providers like the Friday street date, not all physical merchants have given the change their blessing; some indie labels and indie merchants are opposed to having the global street date on Friday. They say they like the concept of having street dates early in the week because they feel it helps sell more CDs -- devout customers of an artist will come in on Tuesday while others will come in on payday, which is usually at the end of the week. Yet, in the end, brick-and-mortar stores and indie labels may not have much say in picking which day of the week functions as the global street date.

That and charts might have to be reconfigured to better track total sales, which is probably causing Casey Kasem to utter a downpour of curses in the afterlife.

Still, this won't happen for a bit. As of now, the biz is eying July 2015 for the change to Friday.

October 8, 2013

...With a heavy heart, however, we feel it's time to turn off the bot. It's not an easy decision, but a few factors have proven hard to overcome. We get more DMCA notices these days than ever before (mostly regrading photos, believe it or not) and our advertising has dried up. Google doesn't appreciate our aggregation as it once did.

At this point, we're planning on keeping the lights on until the end of November. After that, we'll probably redirect the domain elsewhere.... [Elbows Blog]

October 7, 2013

Thom Yorke is well known for his general dissatisfaction with music industry pay models at this point. Radiohead helped affect a sea change in the music industry by becoming early adopters of the pay-what-you-want online sales model. Since then, Yorke and Radiohead producer/Atoms For Peace collaborator Nigel Godrich have become outspoken critics of the pay models built into online streaming services, and of Spotify in particular.

Yorke and Godrich also argued that Spotify is essentially set up to benefit its shareholders, rather than the artists whose music it offers to its users, and that the service colludes with major labels in an effort to wring more profits out of their classics-rich catalogues.

The debate petered out for a while, but picked up again last week when Yorke gave an interview to the Mexican culture site Sopitas, in which he again disputed Spotify's sustainability in response to a question about the future of mainstream music. Yorke offered a particularly memorable analogy at the end of his response. Here's the whole thing:

"I feel like the way people are listening to music is going through this big transition. I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen. But it's all about how we change the way we listen to music, it's all about what happens next in terms of technology, in terms of how people talk to each other about music, and a lot of it could be really fucking bad. I don't subscribe to the whole thing that a lot of people do within the music industry that's 'well this is all we've got left. we'll just have to do this.' I just don't agree.

When we did the In Rainbows thing what was most exciting was the idea you could have a direct connection between you as a musician and your audience. You cut all of it out, it's just that and that. And then all these fuckers get in the way, like Spotify suddenly trying to become the gatekeepers to the whole process. We don't need you to do it. No artist needs you to do it. We can build the shit ourselves, so fuck off. But because they're using old music, because they're using the majors... the majors are all over it because they see a way of re-selling all their old stuff for free, make a fortune, and not die. That's why to me, Spotify the whole thing, is such a massive battle, because it's about the future of all music. It's about whether we believe there's a future in music, same with the film industry, same with books.

To me this isn't the mainstream, this is is like the last fart, the last desperate fart of a dying corpse. What happens next is the important part."

You can listen to the whole interview with Yorke below. Spotify turns five years old today; if you want to celebrate, you'll have to choose someone else's music to stream from its archives.

September 12, 2013

Former Live Nation head Irving Azoff has teamed with the
Madison Square Garden Company (MSG) for a new music venture called Azoff MSG Entertainment. Forbesreports that MSG agreed to pay Azoff Music Management $125 million and contribute a $50 million line of credit for the new company. Not a record company in the old school sense, AMSGE offers 360 Deals which encompass all aspects of their careers. Writes Forbes:

What makes this venture interesting is that the company will have four divisions; artist management, music publishing, television production and live event branding, and digital branding. Couple that with the many venues owned by MSG that could host concerts with the company's artists, and you have a look at what the new world record major label looks like.

For the record, Azoff and MSG chairman James Dolan aren't calling this a record label, but they don't have to. It's an outdated term for an outdated concept anyway. The traditional record label combined talent scouting, artist development, distribution and marketing, but each of those operations have changed substantially in the new millennium. Record labels now have fewer A&R talent scouts than ever, and in this one-failure-and-done atmosphere we live in, artist development is merely a nice term with little execution. Couple that with a dying brick and mortar music retail business and companies that market really well in media that mostly doesn't matter nearly as much to music consumers as it once did, and you can see that something in the way the current music business is run has to change. - [Forbes]

August 15, 2013

With a roster filled with numerous emcees, Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) has taken a different route with their newest signee, SZA. Hailing from Maplewood, New Jersey, the songstress was announced as the label's latest addition earlier in the week.

Prior to signing with TDE, SZA released a handful of projects including last year's See.SZA.Run and an EP titled, S. The singer is also gearing up for the release of her Z EP, which will feature her recent singles, "Julia" and "Teen Spirit."...

...This latest news from TDE comes shortly after it was rumored that Queens rapper Action Bronson and singer Jhene Aiko would serve as TDE's newest signee's. As of now, neither of the two artists are signed to TDE.